Making A New World

Field Music

SKU: MI0569LPX

Barcode: 5056340100363

19.00 £19.00
  • Genre: Rock And Pop
  • Label: Memphis Industries
  • Released Date: 10th January 2020
  • Buying Format:
    180g 1LP Coloured Vinyl Gatefold Sleeve Includes Download Code

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Field Music’s new release is ‘Making A New World’, a 19 track song cycle about the after-effects of the First World War. But this is not an album about war and it is not, in any traditional sense, an album about remembrance. There are songs here about air traffic control and gender reassignment surgery. There are songs about Tiananmen Square and about ultrasound. There are even songs about Becontree Housing Estate and about sanitary towels.

The songs grew from a project for the Imperial War Museum and were first performed at their sites in Salford and London in January 2019. The starting point was an image from a 1919 publication on munitions by the US War Department, made using ‘sound ranging’, a technique that utilised an array of transducers to capture the vibrations of gunfire at the front. These vibrations were displayed on a graph, similar to a seismograph, where the distances between peaks on different lines could be used to pinpoint the location of enemy armaments. This particular image showed the minute leading up to 11am on 11th November 1918 and the minute immediately after. One minute of oppressive, juddering noise and one minute of nearsilence. “We imagined the lines from that image continuing across the next hundred years,” says the band’s David Brewis, “and we looked for stories which tied back to specific events from the war or the immediate aftermath.” If the original intention might have been to create a mostly instrumental piece, this research forced and inspired a different approach. These were stories itching to be told.

The songs are in a kind of chronological order, starting with the end of the war itself; the uncertainty of heading home in a profoundly altered world (‘Coffee Or Wine’). Later we hear a song about the work of Dr Harold Gillies (the shimmering ballad, ‘A Change Of Heir’), whose pioneering work on skin grafts for injured servicemen led him, in the 1940s, to perform some of the very first gender reassignment surgeries. We see how the horrors of the war led to the Dada movement and how that artistic reaction was echoed in the extreme performance art of the 60s and 70s (the mathematical head-spin of ‘A Shot To The Arm). Then, in the funk stomp of ‘Money Is A Memory’, we picture an office worker in the German Treasury preparing documents for the final instalment on reparation debts – a payment made in 2010, 91 years after the Treaty of Versailles was signed. A defining, blood-spattered element of 20th Century history becomes a humdrum administrative task in a 21st Century bureaucracy.

LP format pressed on 180g transparent red vinyl in a gatefold sleeve with digital download code.

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Track Listings

  1. Sound Ranging
  2. Silence
  3. Coffee Or Wine
  4. Best Kept Garden
  5. I Thought You Were Something Else
  6. Between Nations
  7. A Change Of Heir
  8. Do You Read Me?
  9. From a Dream, Into My Arms
  10. Beyond That Of Courtesy
  11. A Shot To The Arm
  12. A Common Language Pt 1
  13. A Common Language Pt 2
  14. Nikon Pt 1
  15. Nikon Pt 2
  16. If The Wind Blows Towards The Hospital
  17. Only In A Man’s World
  18. Money Is A Memory
  19. An Independent State

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